


The Other Door

by vaguely_concerned



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-15
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-01-19 12:17:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1469473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaguely_concerned/pseuds/vaguely_concerned
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Anna was a baby, he’d fetch her from her crib on nights like that and sleep with her lying on his chest, warm and breathing and safely nestled under his palm.</p><p>(He knows better than anyone that there’s no underlying design of the universe that keeps a protective hand over the innocent, no twist of mercy on nature’s part to make sure things too horrible to imagine stay unhappened; it’s why you have words like ‘widower’ and ‘orphan’, but none for someone who has lost a child.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other Door

Sometimes when he dreams he’s someone else; a different man who is still somehow him. They’re strange dreams, far more elaborate and fantastical than most things that pass through his brain on their own, the details minute and interwoven like tiny pieces of clockwork coming together to set big things in motion.  

They’re things like: standing in a high place, the wind ruffling through his hair, a sharp white light stinging his eyes as, far away, there’s a cry as if from some giant bird. A city held aloft by something intangible deep in the fabric of the world, clouds passing by beneath it like some desolate ever-shifting landscape. Banners the color of arterial blood flapping in the wind, shrouding buildings constructed on the death and broken bones of dark men and women with no hope in their eyes.

Things like: the familiar feeling of still-warm blood slicking his forearms and knowing there’s someone else there, someone who is watching him. Standing on the wrong side of a locked door, knowing that whatever he set out to do, he just failed. A soft slender hand slipping out of his grasp. Snow in July.

Things like: he can’t find Anna anywhere.

 

\-------

 

_“Heads or tails,” says the girl, coin resting across her pale knuckles._

_He says: “Does it matter?”_

_She says: “Everything matters to someone somewhere, Booker. Heads or tails? Bird or cage?”_

_He says:_ “Does it matter?”

_She tips her head on one side: “Would it matter to you if it matters?”_

_He says: “Yes.”_

_“Then it does.”_

 

\-------

 

When Anna was a baby, he’d fetch her from her crib on nights like that and sleep with her lying on his chest, warm and breathing and safely nestled under his palm.

(He knows better than anyone that there’s no underlying design of the universe that keeps a protective hand over the innocent, no twist of mercy on nature’s part to make sure things too horrible to imagine stay unhappened; it’s why you have words like ‘widower’ and ‘orphan’, but none for someone who has lost a child.)

These days he’ll go to her room and check in on her, watching the drawings on the wall - a long line of Eiffel towers, roughly arranged in ascending levels of age and descending level of wonkiness - until he’s convinced himself she’s still breathing. Sometimes she’ll stir enough to ask if something’s wrong, and when he says it’s nothing, just checking, go back to sleep, she’ll go ‘uh-huh’ like he’s transparent as glass and doze off again. He looks at the stacks of books strewn over every flat surface in there, the sketches of machinery and the neatly written pages of god knows what - she definitely didn’t get any of that from him, but her teachers keep telling him she’s a smart kid and he’s got no trouble believing them. Half of the time when she talks these days he feels the need to have a dictionary at hand. That must be a good sign.  

 

And he’s not a good man, is never going to be; more often than not, he’s been the reason that little girls like her have needed heroes - but that’s not her fault.

 

\-------

 

_The lighthouse throws a beam of light like a knife blade through the darkness, and the stars above glow along with it, like they’re sharing the same pulse._

_“What is this place?” he asks, glancing out over the dark water._

_She purses her lips thoughtfully. “It’s not as much a_ place _as... a metaphor, I suppose. A way for the brain to interpret something too true and too deep to look directly at.”_

_“...was that meant to clear things up?”_

_“I’m sorry, it’s kind of hard to explain without... breaking grammar. It_ is _, but it also_ has been _and_ will be _. Think of it as the backstage of reality. This is where you go between acts, where your script is handed to you. If every you that could happen,_ will _happen...”_

_On some instinctual level he thinks he knows what she’s talking about, and he doesn’t like it._

_“Elizabeth.”_

_“Booker.”_

_Head or tails, bird or cage - Anna or Elizabeth. What the hell kind of choice is that?_

_“You’ll be happier there, where I don’t even exist.”_

_“What’s that got to do with anything? I’m not about to abandon you, either.”_

_“You’ve already chosen,” she says quietly. “Somewhere out there, you’ve made every single choice at least once. If you don’t end up being the man I know... someone else will.”_

_And he knows the truth of it, can feel the thousands, millions of men who are and aren’t him like phantom aches in his head, ready to go back out on the stage and speak the right lines._

_“I don’t_ know _which one I am,” he says._

_“Then just flip it and see.”  She puts the coin down in his palm. Her hand is very small in his, and very cold._

 

\-------

 

Anna has been waiting to go to the library all week. The stack of books she’d brought with her last time had run out faster than she’d thought, and the last few days she’s been desperately rereading ‘The Three Musketeers’, but now she’s here, camped out on the pillows that the librarians have put on the floor in the children’s section and looking through the pile of books she’s decided on for this round.

Going to the library is one of those things they do together - she’s said more than once that she could go alone, but her dad seems to like the library, despite the fact that she’s never seen him pick up a book to read it even once. (She _has_ seen him pick up books in order to squash cockroaches that one time they’d invaded the apartment, but since the head librarian had very clearly expressed her displeasure when they handed in the books Anna tries to make sure they don’t get a repeat performance of that.) More often than not he’ll end up dozing in a chair over by the newspapers, looking peculiarly like a wild animal curled up comfortably on someone’s living room couch. Anna’s pretty sure one of the younger librarians is a little sweet on him, because she keeps putting a thin blanket over him whenever Anna takes too long.

There’s the sound of someone clearing their throat and Anna glances up from the book she’s been reading. A young woman is sitting on the pillows next to her.

Anna brushes her hair behind her ear and waits for the woman to say something, but she doesn’t, so Anna tries a little: “Hi?”

“Hi,” the woman says, the corners of her mouth pulling up. “Good book?”

Anna thinks about it. “It’s okay,” she decides. “It could do with a little more action, though; sometimes it’s like reading people just _talking_ at each other for fifteen pages.”

The woman has dark hair, shorter than Anna thinks she’s seen any girl wear it. She reminds Anna of someone, but she can’t quite get a grasp on who.

The woman reaches out and takes a book from the shelf, seemingly at random. “So how old are you?” she asks, her soft pale hands turning the pages of the book lightly.

“Eleven,” Anna says. “Well, eleven and seven months.”

“Hm. Are you here on your own?”

“No, my dad’s over there,” she says, waving towards the comfier chairs and quieter atmosphere of the newspaper corner.

The woman’s expression changes, just a little bit, around the eyes. It looks almost like hunger. “Oh.”

A silence settles between them.

“This is going to sound kind of weird,” the woman says, “but you’re happy, right?”

Anna blinks. “I... suppose so? I mean, it’s school again on Monday and we’re doing lots and lots of handwriting this week and I’m not very good at it. Oh, and the maid has the day off so dad might try cooking something himself, but other than that... ”

The woman has eyes that are very blue, like the sky on a clear day. “Good. That’s... that’s good, Anna.”

The hairs on the back of Anna’s neck raise slightly. “How do you know my name?”

“Kind of a long story.” The woman stands up, brushing off her blue skirt. Her right little finger is missing, covered up by a thimble. “I just wanted to see it for myself.”

“See what?”

The woman smiles like something is hurting. “That sometimes it turns out okay.”

“I... I don’t understand - ”

“It’s nothing, really. I think I should be leaving.”

“But -”

“Anna?”

Her dad is standing in the doorway behind the woman, standing very still. The woman tenses up.

“I’ve got to go,” she says, not turning around.

“Are you okay?” Anna says carefully, clutching the edges of her book. “You seem a little....”

The woman has already started walking towards the door on the other side of the room, but she turns her head to give Anna a smile. “With any luck I will be.”

Anna’s distracted from answering by her dad putting his hand on her shoulder.

“Anna,” her dad says, his hand tightening a little on her shoulder as the woman disappears out the door, “go get your things. We’re leaving.”

“What?” She looks up at him, surprised. “But I haven’t even looked through all the - ”

“Right now,” he says, and he’s using the flat tone that she knows means he’s serious, so she just makes a confused face and fetches her coat and the book she’d been reading.

“I’m taking this one, at least,” she says, daring him to disagree.

“Leave it. We’ll come back tomorrow, okay?” he adds at her mutinous look, taking her hand and steering her resolutely towards the exit. “Tomorrow you can take the whole damn library with you and I won’t say a word.”

That seems like a fair enough deal, so she slips the book onto a table as they pass and hopes someone is going to put it back on the shelf so she’ll find it again. The youngest librarian looks up as they close in on the exit, giving them a bewildered wave which Anna’s dad doesn’t return.

“Aren’t you taking any books today, Anna?” the librarian calls after them, like she’s worried Anna’s running a fever.

“Got to go, I’ll be back tomorrow, have a nice day, Ms Michaels,” Anna calls back, letting herself be pulled out the door and onto the street. “Dad, that was kind of rude.”

“M-hm,” he says, patently not listening. He’s looking up and down the street as if expecting armed hoodlums to appear at every turn. Anna trails after him, swerving out of the way of passing pedestrians as best she can.

“Does this have anything to do with that girl?” Anna says, her dad niftily grabbing her arm and steadying her as she trips a little on the edge of the pavement. He leaves his hand there, as if he wants to make sure she’s not going to go up in a cloud of smoke if he lets go of her.

He takes a long time answering, looking around the street with guarded eyes. “I... don’t know.”  

She looks at his profile, hurrying to keep up with his giant steps. “I’m kind of freaking out here.”

He snorts a little. “You’re not the only one, trust me. Just... just go with it. Humor your old man.”

They turn down a new street, one Anna doesn’t recognize. “Where are we going?”

He’s quiet for long enough that she knows the real answer is that he doesn’t actually know. “Away.”

“Away where?” Something in his voice makes her chest go tight and fluttery at the same time.

“Just...” he waves his hand as if to indicate general all-encompassing away-ness. That doesn’t sound like a very promising plan. She tries to brace her heels against the ground to stop them.

“I don’t understand.”

“And you don’t have to. Come on.”

“But _why_?”

He stops, finally. After a moment he crouches down so their faces are level.

“Because,” he says, looks away and then starts again, “because I’m not sure why, but something about that girl - I’m scared. I’m scared that something bad’s going to happen, or someone’s going to take...”

It’s true, too. She’s not sure she’s ever seen her father honestly frightened before - edgy, restless, all-round less serene than most people she’s met, but never frightened. Or perhaps, she thinks now, she’s never seen his fear for the same reasons people usually don’t notice the air around them - it has always been there.

She reaches out and hugs him, pushing her face into his shoulder the way she used to when she was still small enough for him to carry her to bed most nights. He smells exactly the same, like cigarette smoke and gunpowder and the aftershave she’s fairly sure her mother must have picked for him once and which he hasn’t thought to stop wearing since.

(Anna knows that under all that there’s the stench of blood, because she is almost twelve years old and smart and she has no one but him. She’s watched him all her life, and sometimes it’s hard not to see things like how he occasionally doesn’t sleep for days, or how he doesn’t drink but looks at every bottle he comes across as if it’s a bomb ready to go off.

She knows: he has done something for which he doesn’t expect to be forgiven.

She knows: she loves him way too much to ever ask him what it was.)

Quietly her father puts his arms around her and pulls her even closer. For a moment Anna thinks she sees a flash of blue out of the corner of her eye, but when she turns her head there's no one there. 

"I'm not going anywhere," she murmurs.

"You don't always get to choose things like that," her father says. 

 

\-------

 

_And the lighthouse darkens as the stars flicker out, one after the other, and he wakes up in his own head as if he never left it. His legs take over from there, carrying him right to the door of her room and inside._

_She’s there, a small shape under the blankets. When he’s close enough to brush the dark hair away from her forehead and pull the covers up over her shoulder, she sighs a little in her sleep and burrows her face into the pillow. She’s got a book and a flashlight badly hidden away in the space between the bed and the wall, as if she imagines he doesn’t know when she’s sneaking in some illicit night reading from the way she giggles and gasps “no way” to herself over plot twists._

_When a man came knocking on his door with an offer to wipe away his debt, he ran, because there are some prices you can’t afford to pay no matter what. And it had been stupid and reckless, of course; if the various unsavory men he’d pissed off in his time ever caught up with him he had no backup plan, and god only knew what people like them would do with a baby. Even now there’s no guarantee that it won’t happen, tomorrow or next week or in five years. It’s been over ten years, but all it’d take is one guy with a memory for faces and a flair for holding grudges._

_And still he can’t help feeling that running might be the only smart thing he’s done in his life._

_He leaves the door a crack open, stands in front of it for a long time and waits for his head to settle back down._

_He thinks about all those poor bastards who made the other choice and leans his forehead against the door, listening to the slow even sound of her breathing until the dream is once more just a dream._


End file.
